I don’t like the content in the first panel and the panel does imo not look very professional, but the rest looks good if the target audience is brand new visitors. I would probably combine panel 1 and panel 3 (the one with the statistics) into one panel. The link to the forum needs to be displayed more prominently, somewhere in the top menu. I would not include “How do I delete my account” (and similar questions) in the FAQ, if the target audience is new users. These questions should instead be more noob-centred (“how do I start editing”, “how do I add my own music to MB”, etc).
Panel 1:
First of all you need to reduce the height of the first panel (or add more visual cues), because it’s not obvious that you can scroll further down. The only visual cue that shows that there is more content below is the scroll bar to the right.
I don’t understand why the search bar is placed here, when there’s also one at the top of the screen.
The images in the cover art panel are way too big and they are rectangular (CAA thumbnails are square).
The twitter part is pretty useless since the info (news, etc) usually only gets posted on the blog.
There were not there this morning… page seems to be evolving. Likely to be why that panel has a “thrown together” look now.
The twitter stuff is suppressed on my screen. Don’t see it. But then I kill a lot of tracking data. Replacing blog headlines with Twitter is shutting people out.
I like the redesign, however I am missing some of the usability features from the old one. These are my quick thoughts atm:
I’m not sure why there is a Twitter feed instead of the latest posts from the MetaBrainz blog. Even though there is a link to the blog in the top menu, it was very useful to see if there were any updates for mb server or Picard right away on the main page without needing to go anywhere else. Twitter has way more useless stuff for me that I don’t really care about although I get that you probably want it for increasing of the engagement of people. Perhaps there could be a couple of widgets on the main page which could be configurable in user profile to allow the user to display which one(s) they want to see, similar way as it is done on Jira dashboard for example?
Apart from that, I am also missing the menu dropdowns for My Data, Search, Editing and Documentation. I am using all of them like all the time. The only ones I don’t really use are About Us (used very rarely for Statistics) and Products (I never used this one).
That’s pretty much it for now, other than these things it is a really good looking redesign so good job on that!
Edit: I just want to add that from the Search dropdown I only used the Search Edits option and from the Documentation dropdown I only used the Style Guidelines option (however I was using both of these very frequently). I am aware that the latter one is available after clicking on the Docs, but it’s now on another page and you need to search for it within that page instead of it being an option in the sub-menu, where it was available on as one of the top options directly on the main page.
As for My Data and Editing dropdowns, I was using (or can imagine myself using in the future) most of the stuff that’s in there.
Additionally, I am not sure which of the dropdowns entries are being used by other users (perhaps you have some statistics for that?) but for example I would be completely ok with moving Search Edits from the Search dropdown into the Editing dropdown if you happen to find out that nobody has been using the other 3 entries in the Search dropdown at all. This way we could have only one instead of 2 dropdowns displayed and it would have all the entries that are being used by the users. The same could be said for Style Guidelines as well however I’m not sure if it would be a good fit for the Editing menu. Also it’s very likely that other users are using way more options from the Search and Documentation dropdowns than me so this wouldn’t work anyway.
Perhaps we could go the same route as my suggestion for the MetaBrainz blog/Twitter widget and let users choose which menu entries they want to have displayed? (Those would need to be located in the additional second row or something as there is currently no space available within the first row.)
Due to the fact that users dont scroll, adding in the same page search functionalities and “corporate” information is not useful and affects negatively the ranking of the page. “Corporate” information should be moved in the “About” section of the site.
As far as the searching funcionalities, the preselection of the query field (artist, release, …) is more DB oriented than user oriented; a free search (like in Sonemic or Discogs) with results categorized by artist, release, and so on is more natural and intiutive.
Moreover, in addition to search functionalities, browsing features should be added for users interested in discovering new music (by genre, country, year or combinations thereof); this “navigation” support also improves the indexing of the site in search engines.
Since it is MusicBrainz itself, I didn’t think about adding it to the Explore Us section.
I do agree on your thoughts about moving the forum link to top. Will make sure to add it
I’ll soon be making a component which facilitates the blog and removes the old twitter implementation right at the beginning!
if you want to use react and have it still work for people with js disabled you’ll want to look into server side rendering/static site generation (something like next or gatsby)
The slider issue has been fixed as well as the background with a blurred feel to it looks nice I think now with the search bar.
I’ll surely look into the code recommendations, sounds nice!
I do agree with the interactions part, hence the page is showcasing all the amazing and important stuff. Other than the Explore MB section, everything is essential as discussed and tbh feel kinda nice. I think majority of my problem was solved as soon as I geared the first slide with the search. Let me know your thoughts again, if anything! Thanks!
Thanks for the review @justcheckingitout .
We aren’t advertising anything, just letting people know that our projects exist in a spectrum and we’re looking for everyone to explore them as well.
I worked on the search functionality after reading through your comments the other day. Thanks for the points @IvanDobsky ! Currently, I really like the implementations. Let me know your thoughts again if any
We’ve been having a discussion regarding this on the irc channels and decided to be more active on twitter, I will be taking the lead to make sure we timely post. Plus there are more benefits to displaying twitter once we make sure we don’t add in any cookies!
(Those would need to be located in the additional second row or something as there is currently no space available within the first row.)
